“Why were you not open with me? why did you trick me?”
“I did nothing, sirrah. I could not plump the words into your mouth. I knew naught about Tournay, nor of John Strewe of Middleburgh, nor of Brampton, nor of this Pregent Meno who took you to Ireland. All that I knew were the lies you had told me. It is you, you who condemn yourself, not I. Marry! I wanted but the truth, and now I have it.”
“I thought — I thought you loved me …”
“Perhaps I did. Let that be the cud for you to chew on through your miserable, recreant life. I thought once that I loved you. But I am not the first woman, nor will I be the last, to be cozened like Mother Eve with a serpent’s hissing. We women are easily cheated by our eyes, and our ears are fatally open to a villain’s pleading. We believe because we wish to believe, and we fall, God save us, of our own weak will, yea, even when we know that we are bubbled. That I have been a fool, like many of my sisters in this world, seems small cause to have me live here shamed with you, half-bedfellow to that scullion, Simnel. Had you maintained your lie, you would at least have spared me mockery.”
“I am sorry,” he whispered, his face deathly white. “If I could have spared you pain, lady, gladly would I have done it. But you will not be mocked. Men will pity you that one so innocent in heart should have been ravished on a lie. His holiness will not quibble at a divorce when this cardinal pleads in your favour. Then can you marry whom you will and blot me out in others’ eyes.”
“O, I will marry again,” said she, with a smile; “be certain, at least, of that. I must be cleansed by honest loving in honourable wedlock, having been deflowered by trickery. Only thereby will I be able to salve my pride as a woman.”
To look away from her was impossible, so great was his love; yet to sec the contempt and loathing in her eyes made him wish that he was dead. That calmly amidst the wreck of his dreams she could talk of marrying some other man, as though he were already in his grave or had never been her husband, struck him so cruelly that he feared he would weep. He tried, but he could not hate her. Always had she been withdrawn from him in spirit, save in rare moment of passion; always had he felt shut out from her heart while desperately longing to enter it and to be loved wholly, in spirit as well as in body. Now that she was forever lost to him, his fever of longing was fiercer than it had ever been. It was as though he had been poisoned with desire, bewitched into becoming the slave who both loved and hated the bonds in which disdainfully and, now against her will, she held him, and he knew that she had to make only one forgiving gesture for him to be at her feet, ashamed, abased, yet happy. In his passion and love, almost he struck her. Ay, in hurting her would he have found gratification, a conquest of her at least in the flesh; only, he knew that, he could not do it. Had they been alone, he might have acted and have slapped and beat her till she wept and confessed his mastery. But with the king and his gossip, the cardinal, relishing his misery, he would not give them the pleasure of seeing how cruelly he had been hurt. But to remain and not to touch her, either in love or in hatred, was such sweet torment that it was beyond his bearing.
“My lord,” he cried in a choking voice, “will you permit me to go? Else I’ll turn mad and strangle this whore and trample her.”
“Whore!” she shrilled. “He calls me Whore, by God, the whoreson calls me Whore! Hear you that, your grace? He calls me Whore!”
“Take him,” said the king, nodding to the clerk. “The guard is in the ante chamber and will escort him to his lodgings.”
Quickly, with one last raging look at the white face and glaring eyes of this woman staring at him, Perkin turned and walked quickly from the room, the clerk at his heels; and not until the door had clicked shut behind him did Katherine relax, her body sagging as though suddenly her bones gave in their sockets. Wildly, she looked from king to cardinal, panting, her fists clenched.
“You heard him call me Whore?” she cried in a harsh voice. “Wherefore did he call me Whore who has been false to no man? I told him no lies; I never said I loved him, though I did, I think, and yet he calls me Whore because I would marry for my good fame. Had he stood true to himself, even though he were a false Richard, I would have loved him still; but how can one love a man who does not love his honour? Did he think that I, a Gordon, sibling of kings, could be content to be a tradesman’s wife or to live hunted, despised, the wife of the coward whom King Henry disdained to kill? I am a better man than he, it seems.”
Neither king nor cardinal spoke, although it seemed that she appealed to them as though they were the judges of her honesty.
“I have killed him,” she whispered, “killed him more cruelly than if I’d urged him to the hangman. The dead are safe with God or the devil, but the living dead, the soul-less ones lamenting what they cannot forget … they are like the Wandering Jew, unslaked and desperate, lepers of the soul to whom death would be merry. Yea,” she sighed, “I tricked him to confess. There was he right; but had he had the stomach of a gentleman, he would have defied me and have died a Prince of England. Now, dishonoured, unlamented, he must live on, the shell of a man. And of my making, too. I did not know that a woman had such power over the souls of men; but I despise him for it.”
Despise him, hate him, though she might, nevertheless there were tears on her lashes when she blinked away from the king’s steady gaze and looked into the shadows, feeling suddenly old and weary of the burden of life. For life without love was a shadow of death, and she felt certain, taunt him though she had with threats of a second husband, that even should she live a hundred years, never, never would she want to marry again and thereby open her heart to further suffering.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A WIFE AND NO WIFE
THE Queen of England kept small estate. Attending her, Katherine found, entailed few duties, so neglected was she by her husband, so meagre were the sums given to support her household. Mostly, she lived in Westminster Palace and she rarely accompanied the king when he travelled the country, going from palace to palace and manor to manor, that he might feed on his subjects’ stores and calculate their wealth for taxing. No pretence of love or even of affection did he condescend to show her and he visited her mainly because he could not be content with the children she had borne him: Prince Arthur, now eleven years of age; Margaret, eight; and Henry, six; but Arthur being an ailing child, his freshly grafted lineage needed further heirs to root itself, in England.
Being in attendance during the hours of labour, Katherine wept when she saw that it was a girl, no boy, and she knew that the king would blame his wife for this failure in a wifely duty. And, more frightening to the queen, her ladies well knew, than his anger was his love. Had she been fortunate enough to bear a third son, he might mayhap have left her in sterile peace, save to give shrewd taunts when occasion offered, but he had to have further sons, he must make certain of the throne for future generations, and therefore must she submit to him again and yet again.
Always when the whisper ran that he was coming that night, her women would see the colour leave her skin and they sighed for her. She was still beautiful, the most beautiful woman, Katherine believed, that she had ever seen, having the strong and shapely body of a true Plantagenet, and her family’s golden hair, clear skin, smiling eyes and friendly manner. Without the loss of dignity could she unbend from her greatness and talk and act like any ordinary woman unweighted with sorrow and a crown. Taller than most of her sex, yet not too tall, and excellently proportioned, she, true queen, concealed her sufferings behind a placid demeanour; and in that did Katherine feel kinship with her. She, too, had been trained to conceal her woman’s thoughts, fending off the carnal world with an indifferent air and unrevealing eyes; and knowing how herself suffered under this stress, she could feel the queens wretchedness as though it were her own.
“A princess, your highness,” she had whispered when she swung the new-born baby to make it howl and live. The queen had not replied, so heavy was that blow and
bitter disappointment. Hollow-cheeked, she had looked up, dry lips moving without sound; then she had groaned and sunk back on the ermine-decorated scarlet pillow with its border of cloth of gold, while a lady sponged the sweat from her temples. In that chamber there had been no men present; they waited, lords spiritual and temporal, in the adjoining chamber. Women alone could help the queen during her labour, performing the usual offices and becoming her butlers, panters, sewers, carvers, cupbearers, and such. Not once had she cried out in her pain. Lips tight-set, her hazel eyes seeming round and blind with suffering, she had gripped her women’s hands, only for this … for another useless princess which meant that her martyrdom must be repeated in the embrace of a man she loathed.
Fortunate were common women, thought Katherine, who married for love of a man or who, even though married against their will, could take happiness with lovers when the husband was away. A queen, alas, was never alone. Wherever she went, her women must go with her. They washed and dressed her; they served her at meals and watched each morsel she ate, each sup she drank; even to the necessity-chamber had they to go with her; and at night, one of them always slept on the truckle-bed at the foot of her huge bed. A prisoner bound in courtesy’s law, she remained to mope through life, and having, at his whim, to surrender to her husband with no pretty pretences of love but as a damned necessity to breed sons that he might maintain his rotten lineage; and lest she cheat the kingdom with a bastard for the Tudor throne, she was given not a step of freedom. In this prison of matrimony it was the fate of all women to suffer, unless they were those fortunate ones with affectionate and understanding husbands, or termagents who ruled their homes with ceaseless chatter or with tears; but the queen, being above them in all things, must be above other women also in her dolour. Thank God, said Katherine, I never bore a child to Perkin! In that, at least, had God and His saints proved kind to her.
Kind also had they been, she had once believed, in giving her a husband she could love … Bitter now was the thought that she, blessed here above most of her sisters, was yet damned because of it. Had she hated her false Richard, detesting his embraces as the queen detested her king’s, she could have exulted in his present humiliation and have been delighted to see him suffer. Instead, his humiliations humiliated her. Try hard though she did to think of him with scorn, she could not do it, and she wept both for herself and for him in their separation and misery. If she could have hated him, merry could she have been amongst the amorous gallants with their eyes cocked to read affirmation in her looks. Alas, she wanted no man other than her husband; and she envied those ladies who could be gregarious in love — there were many such at court although, the king being devout and no lecher, they had to step warily — even while she despised them for their waxen hearts. Before the king that night, she had taunted Perkin by saying that she would take other husbands once she was quit of his yoke; but she made no effort to be quit of it, although often, jestingly, the king suggested men who should fit her well. Always, against sanity, there persisted hope in the future and in the kindliness of the Virgin. Something must happen, she knew not what, that would turn Perkin into a gentleman worthy of being accepted as the husband of a Gordon. Had she pleaded a divorce, it would have been too final a cutting with the past, like the uprooting of her heart which, a sick mandrake, might send her as mad as Maudlin. It would be like murder, killing her husband as surely as if she had stabbed or poisoned him; and that she could not bring herself to do.
With this stone in her heart, she tended the queen; and although she did not speak of her sorrows, the queen in her own sorrow detected it, and, when she was pensive, would try to rouse her with a laugh or would call her woman-jester, whose head was shaved closer than a nun’s, to bring a smile with bawdy prattle and shameless posturing. But like rust had the melancholy settled over Katherine’s heart, as it had settled over the queen’s; and they felt very old and sadly wise together while the other women whispered secrets and made merry, chattering of their lovers and their gowns and their health.
Often did she see Perkin, finding herself, as if by chance, near places where he might be met. Although he was watched and was never alone, they did not treat him as an ordinary prisoner. Given no position at court, made to sleep and eat with the servants, he was not degraded with menial tasks, as Lambert Simnel had been degraded. It seemed that the king could not decide on his fate and left him in a kind of purgatory, forgotten by God and devil. Miserably he slouched through the slow days, head down that he might not see the contempt in others’ eyes; and he became thinner and very careless in his dress, he who had loved finery and cleanliness.
With pity would Katherine seek to find him; then, noting his slovenly garb and dejected air, pity would turn to anger and she would despise him for his spineless giving way before disaster, and she would not speak or look at him. The coward never dared to speak to her. As though she were a stranger and he a servant, he skulled from her presence and her cold eye. Had he been indeed a prince, she raged, he would have fallen on his sword-point rather than submit to such indignities. Yet, grudgingly she had to confess, he acted bravely when again and again the king commanded him to repeat his confession in public or had him carried in a shameful cart through the streets. A prince, indeed, had he appeared on those degrading occasions, dignified, sorrowful and uncomplaining at fate. Before His calm acceptance of tragedy, those who had come to jeer or to throw muck at him were sometimes even moved to tears. Every town at which they had stopped during the journey from Taunton to London, he had been brought before the aldermen and the people to tell them that he was not King Richard IV but Perkin Warbeck, an impostor. Through London to the Tower had he been taken in mock triumph, and copies of his confession were given to any who could read and were sent in batches throughout the country and abroad. Never once, soul-sick though he must have been, had he shown what he suffered. For that, at least, could Katherine find it in her heart at times to forgive him.
For that alone. Now he cringed like a hamstrung cur at court, a creature hiding from the light, lurking in the kitchens and outhouses, and remaining silent before his betters’ sniggering and the jesters’ crude japes. All strength had been drained, out of him, it seemed, and he had been better dead. And often she wished that he were dead. A ghost from her brief grandeur, he remained like an unwanted guest, always a shadow over her so that she could not forget his miserable propinquity. He was no man, she raged, or he’d have hanged himself and made her a hempen-widow. Then, after she had cursed him to herself as a base recreant, she would feel the tears, move under her eyelids and would hurriedly explain to God that she had not meant what she had said, that she did not really wish to be his widow, for she was sorry for the fool. Ay, she was sorry for a man whom she should have adored as her husband, her master, her playfellow, and not have hated with this pity which degraded her equally with him.
Nevertheless, against her wishes, continually did she seek him out in whatever palace or manor they might lodge, appearing suddenly as though by magical chance nigh to where he might be lodged, then looking on him with blank eyes as though she did not know him but thought that he stank. In her presence, rarely was his name spoken, although she knew that her fellow-attendants on the queen made merry at it behind her back, calling her Lady Scullion or Dame Cuckoo or other foolish names which stung. Men, too, would she notice smiling impertinently in her presence, while there were some sliddery twiggers, perfumed and becurled, their doublets padded over their chests to make them seem Hercules on weak legs, who thought she must be easy game because she was wife and yet no wife, the spouse of the living dead, and hoped to sidle close with wanton promises and questing fingers. Smiling would she welcome their approach that she might have the pleasure of later having them flush and stammer under the whip of her scorn and biting tongue. Only, when the king talked to her, she could not reply as she would have liked to have replied. Down at the floor then would she gaze, praying that her villainous blood might not betray her f
eelings in a blush. Not that the king talked bawdy; not that he ever once so much as hinted at a closer meeting; but he would talk teasingly, asking when she would have the cardinal see to the divorce or whom it would be her pleasure to try next in marriage.
Miserly-hearted though he was, the man took a king’s delight in costly garments, having the late king’s wardrobe to ransack, and King Richard had been famed for his gay clothing. Thus could the Tudor content his vanity at small cost to his purse, decking himself with jewels and wearing jewelled collars. When he went abroad, always, to impress the people with his magnificence and his power, he walked or rode under a canopy of estate; and he liked the display of tournaments,’ although he feared even the sight of sharpened steel, and the excitement of the hunt. Music also did he like and there were skilled musicians at his court; but all was done in such niggling fashion that, even when he would be splendid, he showed his meanness and the splendour became tawdry. Gold was his only passion, it seemed. All other, nobler lusts had he subdued to this, the most ignoble of them all; and although foreign ambassadors and his numerous enemies sought for details of sin that they might trumpet them to the world, none could they find beyond this love of money. That was, it seemed, the only weakness that turned him faintly human; and money, above all other lusts, dries the milk of kindness in a man and shrivels his body with his heart.
Rarely did he wash and his face looked always semi-shaven, neither bearded nor completely shaven, the skin yellowish, the blue eyes heavy-lidded, and the lips thin and rarely parted or smiling. In height, he was about five feet ten and he was lean and strong and had no fatness over his bones; but often was he seized with coughing and was shaken to spitting and choking as though some devil fought with his soul and beat him from within. In these frequent bouts of coughing, red marks would splosh under the skin of each high-boned cheek, and, trembling, would he have to sit for some time afterwards while he struggled to regain his breath. It was the rheum, he would say, hitting his chest: the rheum brought with his army from the Low Countries when he had entered England. That rheum to Katherine had in it the croak of impending death, but she could not pity this man who pitied nobody and who seemed to relish hatred.
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